Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (33 page)

Something
exploded in the darkness, a muffled crump and a flash that mimicked the
lighting that was going off almost continuously in the clouds.  Cornelius
smiled for a moment, then grinned as a dozen more blasts sundered the
night.  Those were his men, throwing heavy blast grenades into the enemy
wherever they could see them.  Each grenade had the equivalent of a ton of
explosive in it, and would throw darts of hardened supermetals at high speeds,
capable of penetrating even the armor of a suit if they hit right.

The Captain went
to a knee as he picked up the shadowy figures of suited Cacas.  They had
their stealth systems engaged, and would have been nearly invisible under
normal circumstances.  The rain outlined their forms, and though Cornelius
could only pick out the forms of the trio nearest him clearly, he could see the
indistinct silhouettes of more beyond.

Cornelius pulled
a grenade from his webbing and twisted the cap off, then hit the trigger three times
before throwing it with all his strength toward the Cacas.  In the rain
most of them couldn’t even see the small object that came flying into their
formation, until it had gone off with a deafening roar.  Three of the
Cacas went flying through the air, tossed by the explosion, while several
others fell into the mud.  Walborski aimed his rifle at one of the Cacas
who was struggling to get up from his knees, aiming for the faceplate that was
one of the weak points on the armor.  He squeezed his trigger once, the
chemical rifle phutting out a round, most of the sound captured by the
suppressor on the front of the barrel.  The round hit the faceplate, the
microshape charge shooting a splinter of supermetal through the armor and into
the head of the Caca.  The large soldier went down in a quivering
heap.  Cornelius wasn’t sure if he had killed the creature, but the injury
he had inflicted would put him out of action.

Walborski spent
the next fifteen minutes stalking and killing, using up all of his grenades,
then closing for the kill.  On a couple of occasions the spooked Cacas
fired at ghosts, their proton beams hissing through the rain.  On at least
one occasion one group of Cacas fired at another, and a lively firefight
developed in which at least a half dozen of them were killed.

Empty of
grenades, now he stalked them in earnest, shooting them at their weak points
from close range.  Stabbing them with his monomolecular knife at the
joints.  He was like a ghost in  the dark, coming from nowhere,
leaving a dead or dying Caca behind.  He hoped that his men were doing the
same, and the Cacas refusing to move forward seemed to point to that
result.  The augmented reflexes of the Ranger meant that he moved faster
than the Cacas, had better reaction time, more precise hand eye
coordination.  While he couldn’t stand up to them in an open battle, in
this type of fight he had all the advantages.

As the rain
started to slacken a bit the Rangers withdrew, leaving terrified Cacas to their
rear.  Walborksi and his Top Sergeant made their way back to their own
lines.  Over the next half hour the rest of the Rangers returned, or at
least those who were going to return.  Eighteen of his men didn’t come
back, and he was sure that what was left of them littered the mud in front of
his positions.

When they had
counted down the probables, the number of dead and wounded Cacas topped three
hundred.  Most important, their attack had been blunted, and they had
slunk back to their jumping off point.  He was sure that they would be
coming back, though.  And with the storm starting to break up, he wasn’t
sure that the same tactic would work on them again.

*    
*     *

Cat had only
been in the jungles around the capital city a couple of times.  And both
of those had been field trips with her classmates, with plenty of armed forest
rangers to escort them.  Now she was walking in the line of refugees
through that jungle, her rags of clothes soaked through to her skin from the
rainstorm they had just endured.

There were
animal calls through that jungle that brought chills down her spine.  She
couldn’t tell if they were predators looking for a meal, or harmless arboreal
forms that fed off the leaves of the forest.

“Keep moving,”
said an armored soldier standing on the side of the gully.  The soldier
was in the medium battle armor that the ones called Rangers were wearing, and
not the heavy suits worn by the engineers.  He held a particle beam rifle
in his gauntleted hands, and continually looked over his shoulder at the jungle
behind.  “Don’t keep the people behind you bunched up.  Walk
quickly.”

Cat looked at
the empty water bottle in her hand.  She had sweated the entire way out to
this point, even during the rain, and despite the humidity she had a raging
thirst.  At least her hunger was at bay.  The meal bar she had eaten
had enough calories to last an adult for several days.

“Can we have
some water?” a man ahead asked the soldier, standing in place and looking up,
stopping the flow of traffic as people had to walk around him, into the path of
the next line over.  “We’re dying of thirst here.”

“The caves are
just a short distance ahead.  You can get water there, before you go
through the gate.  Now keep moving.”

The man stared
at the soldier for a moment, then turned and kept walking with slumped
shoulders.  Cat thought the man walked like she felt, exhausted. 
Worn out from the privation of the camp.  She didn’t think anyone was in
shape to walk the twenty or more kilometers they were being forced to
move. 
It’s almost like they’re trying to kill us, since the Cacas
didn’t get around to it
, she thought, then cursed herself for such
thoughts.  The soldiers had come to save them, and many of them had
already paid in blood for the people of New Moscow’s freedom.

*    
*     *

“I think we were
way too optimistic on how fast we could evacuate these people,” said Colonel
Marcie Thunderfoot, the officer in charge of the Fifteenth Army Engineering
Brigade.  “At the rate we’re moving them now, we’ll be lucky to get fifty
million a day off planet.  So we can get all of them off in two weeks, if
nothing else goes wrong, and I’d hate to count on that.”

General Lucius
Arbuckle thought about that for a moment.  They had planned on getting the
civilians off the planet in about ten days, except for those who might want to
stay and try to rebuild the system as the major military base and staging area
they needed in this space.  That presupposed that the Fleet would take and
hold the system, and support the Army in taking the planet.

But now, with
the threat of a larger Caca force moving in, the evacuation took on a new
significance.  If the Fleet lost control of the system for even days the
Cacas would be bombarding this planet, and would most probably kill the
hundreds of millions of civilians still here.

“We need to
expand all of the gates on both ends,” said the engineering officer. “Double
their capacity.  Or, even better, triple it.  Then we can get more of
the civilians to safety.”

Which means
shutting down all of the gates while we move some of them, and increase the
size of the framework for the others.
 The General agonized over the
decision.  Even if they worked as fast as possible, and nothing
unforeseeable came up, they would still have all the gates down for hours, the
ones they needed to move for up to five or six hours.  And that would
translate into millions of people who wouldn’t get off in that time.  And
they still wouldn’t get them all off, while, when the Cacas came, they would
have to move the gates again to remove them from line of sight of orbital
bombardment.

“Leave the gates
where they are, for now,” ordered the General.  “We’ll keep getting them
out as fast as we can, and trust that the Fleet will handle their part of it.”

Chapter Twenty-three

The rules of survival never
change, whether you're in a desert or in an arena.

Bear Grylls.

NEW MOSCOW SPACE.

“We have two
hundred and sixty-one objects,” called out the Tactical Officer.  
“Range, two point three light minutes.  Velocity point nine four
light.  Acceleration, nine hundred gravities.”

High Admiral
Lisantr’nana turned quickly in his seat to stare at the tactical plot, which
showed the new objects as vector arrows.  
If they had been smart,
and just coasted in from wherever they came from, we wouldn’t have spotted them
so soon
, he thought.  They had only picked up the objects from their
graviton emissions.  They could possibly have gotten within fifteen or
twenty light seconds if they hadn’t been putting out gravitons from their
grabbers.  He looked at the vector arrows and realized that only one of
the groupings was actually pointing at his force.

“Which are the
most danger to us?” he asked his Tactical Officer, already pretty sure of the
answer, but wanting to verify his assumption.

“That group
there, my Lord,” said the officer, indicating the force closest to
outsystem.  It was a large group of over a hundred, just like the one
closest to the system star.  The one in the middle was made up of just
over fifty craft, and the High Admiral thought that must have been the wing
that had attacked them earlier.

“Open fire with
all defensive weapons on that force,” he ordered the officer.  “I want
them blown out of space before they launch.”

The Tactical
Officer acknowledged while the Com Officer sent out the order.  The ship
shuddered just a bit from the launches.  Moments later several thousand
green vector arrows appeared, heading for the enemy ships at fifteen thousand
gravities.  All of the ships that had a clear shot fired their lasers,
followed by particle beams.  At the range of two light minutes they were
not very accurate.  Still, some of the enemy vector arrows fell off the
plot, then more, before the craft started going into quick evasive
maneuvers.  That did not save all of them, and eighty-four continued on to
greet the missile storm coming at them.

Many of those
missiles disappeared, taken out by the defensive lasers and the few counters
each craft carried.  But over twelve hundred got into attack range, and
nine hundred and fifty made it to final approach.  It was too much, with
over nine missiles targeting each fighter.  The fighters still took out
several hundred, but at the second of contact all but four of the attack craft
disappeared, killed before they could launch.  Those four launched, from
one and a quarter light minutes.  Sixteen missiles, easily picked off by
the defenses of a fleet.

“Target that
closest group,” he then ordered his officer, pointing at the smallest, the wing
that had been previously mauled.

“We won’t
generate a lot of hits of those craft,” cautioned the Tactical Officer.

“Do it
anyway.  The more we kill here, the fewer we will have to face in the
future.”

Another storm of
counter missiles went out, these at a target almost four light minutes astern
of the fleet.  The missiles were fired on an interception course,
accelerating to come in ahead of the enemy.  The Admiral realized as soon
as they were fired that none of them were going to kill the enemy.  They
were going too fast, and the counters, while having enough acceleration to
eventually catch them, if they didn’t transit into whatever strange place they
had come from, lacked the endurance.  A moment later it didn’t matter.

“They’re gone,
my Lord.  Both groups have just disappeared off the plot.”

“Did they turn
off their grabbers?”

“No, my
Lord.  We were tracking them from their heat as well, and they had been
decelerating for the last couple of minutes.  The heat signatures are
still there, since we won’t see the cessation of those for several minutes. .”

“What do you
have on visual?”  As the Admiral asked that, he realized he should have
asked what they would have, since they wouldn’t see the actual event of
disappearance for minutes now.

“We have some
blurry visuals on those ships, my Lord.  I’m not sure what we’ll see when
we get to the point where they disappeared.  Perhaps with some enhancement
we might see what happened.”

“Very good,”
said the High Admiral, sitting back in his chair.  He zoomed out the
central holo so he could watch the missile storm approaching the enemy
fleet.  So he saw the enemy launch at the same time the Tactical Officer
shouted out the warning.

*    
*     *

“Missile contact
in twelve minutes,” called out the Fleet Tactical Officer.

Fleet Admiral
Jerry Kelvin stared at the plot that showed the enemy missile storm, over
twenty thousand weapons, heading for his force.  Statistically he was sure
most of his command would survive, though the death and destruction that would
visit his fleet was something he really didn’t want to think about.

“Launch all
weapons,” said the Admiral, looking over at the Tactical Officer, then at the
Com Officer.

After listening
to the Com Officer start relaying his orders he looked back at the plot, at the
thousands of enemy missiles that were coming in at point seven eight
light.  And now it was also filling with green vector arrows, thousands of
them as well, as the ships of his fleet started launching through all of their
tubes.  As soon as the first volley was off, they fired another, and
another, until ten volleys were in space.  That left only a few volleys in
their magazines, something counterintuitive when facing a force as large as the
one coming at them.

At the same time
as the missile launch the nine hundred attack fighters launched by the six
fleet carriers with the fleet powered up their grabbers and boosted ahead at
eight hundred gravities, the limit of the larger attack craft that made up half
the swarm.

“Missiles are on
the way, sir,” reported the Tactical Officer, turning from his board to look
back at the Admiral.  “Signals have been transmitted by grav pulse to the
other weapons.”

“Time till we
launch?”

“Thirty-five
minutes, sir,” said the Tactical Officer with a worried look on his face.

There were three
of the super heavy battleships, each carrying two of the wormhole missile
tubes, with launch capacity only limited by how many weapons could be sent
through from the other side.  And the missiles would come through at
whatever velocity they had been pre-accelerated to by the magnetic launch tubes
on the other side.  The Admiral wanted to save those weapons as an ace in
the hole and a final surprise.  Which meant his three largest ships needed
to survive the coming storm.

“Fighter wings
are reporting in,” called out the Com Officer.  “They are moving into
position and getting ready to launch.”

“Missile contact
in eleven minutes.”

And our
missiles will reach them in an hour and a half
, thought the Admiral. 
They’ll would know for over an hour how much they hurt the human force, while the
humans would not know how effective their attack was until they had been
savaged by the enemy.  Many of those humans wouldn’t be around to find out
what happened.

Kelvin sat in
his chair and stared at the holo over the next five minutes, watching as the
enemy storm approached the fighter screen.  He could feel the tension on
the bridge, the smell of fear as brave men and women faced their mortality in
the form of weapons launched by beings who wanted them dead.  Who did not
care that these spacers had plans for their lives, families, dreams.  Who
only saw them as obstacles to their own plans, and obstacles that needed to be
removed.

He could only
imagine what the feelings were like on the fighters who were about to contact
those missiles, and on the screening ships and cruisers, whose mission was to
do whatever they could to protect the heavy hitters of the fleet from harm, so
they could do more of the same to the enemy.  They knew the mission, which
didn’t mean that any of them wanted to die performing that mission, any more
than the crews of the capital ships did.

Please, dear
God,
he prayed silently. 
I ask not for safety for myself, but for
the people that serve under me.  It would be too much to expect for all of
them to make it through.  All I ask is that no one dies because of poor
planning on my part, because I dropped the ball.  I ask that this plan
will work as well as possible, and most of my people make it through.

The Admiral
opened his eyes to stare at the plot, watching things in real time as missiles
and ships maneuvered through use of their grabbers.  The missiles were
within a light minute of the fighters now, and those craft went into action,
using everything in their arsenal to disrupt the missile storm.

Every fighter,
attack and space superiority, turned up both their jamming and their stealth
systems to full power.  Electronic signals lashed the sensors of the
missiles, which boosted their own ECM suites to full.  Normally they
wouldn’t do this until they were much closer to the target, and doing so at
this time gave the ships they were about to attack more information about their
capabilities and jamming patterns.

Now all of the
fighters launched every missile they carried.  None carried anti-ship
weapons, having been loaded with anti-missile birds instead.   Over
ten thousand of the small counter missiles launched, immediately seeking
targets.  Many never got a lock through the jamming of the missiles. 
Others were hit by the defensive systems of the incoming two hundred ton
weapons, small laser rings built into the body to give the missiles more of a
chance of getting through just this kind of defense.  At the same time the
fighters were attempting to lock onto the missiles and get some hits with their
lasers.

Four thousand
missiles were destroyed in the outer defense, while almost two hundred fighters
went up in small bursts of plasma as missiles targeted them instead. 
Sixteen thousand missiles made it through, right into the face of the ship
launched counter missiles that now screamed from their launching vessels at
fifteen thousand gravities.  The fleet lacked the specialized missile
defense ships, they being needed elsewhere, like above the planet, so the
screens were not able to put up the numbers that the new ships would have been
able to.

Thirty thousand
counters tried to stop the incoming weapons.  They ended the flights of
almost seven thousand missiles in bright bursts of fire, leaving over nine
thousand to move into attack range, where the lasers and particle beams started
to pick up and prosecute targets.  Or, in many cases, where they thought
weapons were going to be, their ships’ targeting systems spoofed by the
missiles’ ECM systems.  Still, they took out another two thousand weapons,
while counter missiles fired from close in took out two thousand more, leaving
three thousand to reach the final approach stage, where the close in systems
took over.

Only a thousand
missiles made it past that final approach stage, one twentieth of the initial
storm.  The defense had been amazingly successful, taking out that many
missiles.  But one thousand weapons, all carrying gigaton range warheads,
was still a frightening prospect for the ships targeted.  One hundred and
twelve missiles actually hit, killing one hundred and three ships, mostly
destroyers and cruisers, though three battleships joined the plasma cloud that
was spreading through the fleet.  Most of the rest were near misses, what
were called proximity kills, warheads that detonated close enough to a ship to
send significant heat and radiation into the hull.  In some cases it could
result in a kill, and a battle cruiser, three light cruisers and nine
destroyers exploded from the damage caused antimatter breach.

And then it was
over, and the fleet, battered but not destroyed, was still heading in. 
All of the super heavy battleships survived, as did all of their wormhole
tubes, though two had sustained some hull damage.

Now they
assess the damage they did, based on how many of our ships are still emitting
gravitons, and react accordingly,
thought the Admiral.  It didn’t take
long, only a couple of minutes, until that reaction materialized.

“We have missile
launch,” called out the Tactical Officer, as the first of the red vector arrows
appeared.  After the multiple volleys were fired they had a count of the
missiles coming in.  Thirty thousand, and the Admiral had to wonder if
they could weather this storm as well, or if his fleet would be mere wreckage
after they arrived.

*    
*     *

The Crakista
known as The Admiral in Charge of the Republic Battle Fleet stared at her own
holo as the mixed force moved through hyperspace.  Since the majority of
her ships could only achieve hyper VI, that was the dimension they were
traveling in.  Now she was second guessing herself, wondering if she should
have sent her hyper VII ships ahead in the higher dimension.  There
weren’t many of those, and they didn’t include any battleships or heavy
cruisers, only a couple of score battle cruisers and a hundred and fifty odd
light cruisers and destroyers.  And if she ordered them to translate into
VII now, it would take more than a day to decel down to where they could make
the transition.

The warm blooded
reptiloid did not feel any guilt from her decision possibly not being the best
she could have made.  Her people didn’t feel guilt.  Or, more
accurately, they subsumed any guilt they felt under the calm they had trained
into themselves.  Her people felt emotions, and in fact felt them deeper
than most other intelligent species.  Almost killing themselves off in a
world war gave them reason to explore how to control those emotions, and now
they were known throughout the region as being emotionless.